Protecting Your Inventions With Patents - for Small Businesses and Inventors

Can patents be important for your business?

Understanding intellectual property is not rocket science. But the legal aspects are sometimes counter intuitive or sometimes downright obtuse.

Welcome to The Business of Patents.

Who is this site for?

The answer is quite simple. It is for the many, many independent inventors and managers of small businesses who create inventive ideas and are concerned about whether they should protect them - but are not that familiar with all of the issues (and costs involved) and do not have the time to research these issues because they are busy trying to create or run a small business.

How You Can Use It?

I want this site to be useful - primarily for independent inventors and small businesses. So I have attempted to make the navigation as transparent as possible. The overall structure can be seen in the Navigation Bar on the left. Within each of those categories you will find an introductory page, with a series of useful articles included as links. For an overview of the entire site see the Site Map Navigation Bar, which will show you all of the articles to date. By the way - this site is always a work in progress, so that Site Map will grow with time.

Who am I?

My name is Mike Ervin. I spent a 21 year career in research and product development dealing with those issues. And more recently 14 years of focused experience in helping small business people with dealing with them. Most of that experience has been in the US Patent Office, but quite a bit has been in the European Patent Office and other patent offices around the world.

There are aspects of intellectual property you can elect to do in-house (even do yourself). There are also aspects that you should get professional help. I think I can help you sort out which is which.

So whether your interest is in searching (prior art searches) or how to protect the intellectual property of your business, this site is a portal to useful information for you. Please feel free to explore it and use the information freely.

And if there is more information you need that I am not supplying please let me know.

In Awe of Major inventions. There is something fascinating in looking at inventors and inventions. Whether they are modern inventions or ancient inventions, inventions have changed the direction of everthing.